On the morning of January 9, Twylla Bays pumped a syringe of water into the gastric feeding tube in her 29-year-old daughter Cassy’s abdomen. The reaction was instantaneous and violent: in the space of 30 minutes, Cassy, who has muscular dystrophy and is on a ventilator, had seven bouts of diarrhoea.

At about that time, 15 miles away in Charleston, West Virginia, executives of West Virginia American Water and state officials were deciding when and how to tell 300,000 people their water was not safe to drink.

By 5pm, when word reached Twylla Bays that her tap water was so contaminated it was only fit for flushing toilets, she had given Cassy two more 150cc injections of water along with her medicine and food. Each time, Cassy was sick.

Life in a warming world is going to require human ingenuity to adapt to the new realities of Earth. Greenhouse-gas induced warming and megapolitan expansion are both significant drivers of our warming planet. Researchers are now assessing adaptation technologies that could help us acclimate to these changing realities. But how well these adaptation technologies — such as cool roofs, green roofs and hybrids of the two — perform year round and how this performance varies with place remains uncertain.

According to an international team of researchers, the rapid pace of climate change is threatening the future presence of fish near the equator. “Our studies found that one species of fish could not even survive in water just three degrees Celsius warmer than what it lives in now,” says the lead author of the study, Dr Jodie Rummer from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (Coral CoE) at James Cook University.

Dr Rummer and her colleagues studied six common species of fish living on coral reefs near the equator. She says many species in this region only experience a very narrow range of temperatures over their entire lives, and so are likely adapted to perform best at those temperatures.

After decades of fretting about population explosion, scientists are pointing to a long-term hidden global menace. The household. More specifically, the household explosion.

In this week’s Early Online edition of Population and Environment, Jianguo “Jack” Liu, director of the Michigan State University Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability, and former students Mason Bradbury and Nils Peterson present the first long-term historical look at global shifts in how people live. One large household sheltering many people is giving way across the world to households comprised of fewer people — sometimes young singles, sometimes empty nesters, and sometimes just folks more enamored with privacy.

At BPI Campus our Progressive Agenda is:
1. People matter more than profits.
2. The earth is our home, not our trash can.
3. We need good government for both #1 and #2.

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